Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

Article claims all cash but sounds like probably with vesting for retention

Yup. Always worth looking at goodwill on accounting statements post these acquisitions and thinking about how that is often the actual value of a software/tech business.

This is the true value of any software-based business, not the code.

A pithy statement that is like candy to VC ears, but falls down if you think about it even a little.

Nobody is going to buy Adobe for its client list.

It’s the track record of 0-250k people in six months not just the current number of users. Presumably more people can be added fairly soon at minimal cost.

Also $25 million of that is essentially a retention bonus for the employees.

>Companies like Squarespace set the bar much higher.

When I was evaluating user friendly web platforms for several non-profits, I ended up choosing Wix over Squarespace because Squarespace didn't provide backup>restore functionality. That's a pretty low bar...

This isn't a good analysis of the value here.

My dad has a Shopify site. He'll sometimes accidentally break his theme by making simple modifications in the editor, and it's not obvious why. Maybe a missing quotation mark or a wrongly nested closing tag. He usually had to revert it or even ask for help.

99% of the things he wants to change about his Shopify site would be better done by asking an LLM to change the template for him.

Frankly, I don't want to be editing HTML by hand to make simple edits, either. I just get Cursor or Claude to do it. If I were using a platform like Shopify or Wix where I don't have the templates sitting in my filesystem, I'd like an LLM integration there too.

Almost all of us have an LLM integrated into our code editor, yet when people want to integrate an LLM into the workflows of non-software-devs, suddenly there's cynicism.

> I think the implication here is that the Wix platform sets the bar so low, that even a vibing LLM can surpass it.

I'm not implying anything! Wix is clearly actively designed to be that way.

Prior to the AI boom Wix had developed a niche in very small businesses with events and sales, where it has a lot of the tedious stuff around that in a state where you can no code it into place very fast.

The problems begin when you try to do things slightly different, and this is almost entirely down to the staggering levels of inconsistency in their core APIs. (Genuinely impressively so). Their business model relies on the useful pieces being opaque enough and irregular enough that you cannot move off without overcoming a big migration effort.

Consequently their interest will be in two areas: can they use LLMs to get people to use those existing modules and get locked in faster? Can they own the funnel of people using LLMs to attempt to create this sort of functionality for their existing market? This acquisition helps on both levels, so it makes perfect sense for them.

I just got a little more excited ;)

Not only audit, but offensive security tools such as XBOW [1], backed by Sequoia and that finds and exploits vulnerabilities. I am on the waitlist though.

[1] https://xbow.com/

>It is likely profitable

/s

It's something that frustrates developers, spits out terrible pull requests and only fixes bugs by introducing new and exciting ones.

But it's something that you can put in your company's portfolio to attract VC capital.

It's a terrible tool that makes a lot of money for the corporation.

As far as I can tell it is one of those low code or no code platforms, only it uses Claude as the interface instead of the usual.

I think it's sort of like those no-code style things like powerautomate and wsiwyg editors - it removes the pesky syntax and understanding bits of code while still giving you a custom app result. Except here it replaces drag and drop or flow diagram style editing with 'ai prompts' and then the AI does the code - making it more powerful (although with less control).

I'd guess in a platform they probably pre-prompt it with a context and rules on top of that so users don't have to say things like 'make sure AWS keys are not in the code' and 'users should be authorised for only their data' etc, and give it tools to use to make standard features.

No idea what the end result of the finished apps is though.

LLM chatbot with a VM. The front-end is a file explorer with a preview window. Kind of like bolt.

They do not work, from my experience; or the experience of people using them: https://github.com/stackblitz/bolt.new/issues

It’s a tool that lets anyone create and deploy functional software (usually web-based) by writing prompts in plain English. Usually they are UI “wrappers” for leading AI models (usually Claude). The platforms also usually include online development environments and integrations (for databases, etc).

Examples include Bolt.new, lovable, mgx.dev, google AI studio... Vercel and Replit also have popular platforms. Google AI studio also counts, here. There are probably dozens more.

Sorry about the pretentious other reply.

The real answer is that vibe coding is what people are calling it when you just give prompts to an llm and it writes the code for you. So a vibe coding platform is just an app built around that purpose. A conversation window with a a bot that writes code for you, with a bunch of integrations so that it can do things like databases and auth.

Probably would have been quicker to Google it than to ask here though to be honest :>

> what is a vibe coding platform anyway?

Right now they're something that lets all of those "I have an idea for an app" people actually make the app themselves.

In a few years, they might be much more than that.

Isn't this what lovable and that tool provided by vercel?